Verdigris Deep

by Hardinge, Frances

  ‘It’s OK, Chelle, c’mon, breathe, she’s gone.’ Chelle’s mouth was a loose, downward crescent, and at every heave of her chest there was a high, fluting squeak. ‘C’mon, it’s not a bad attack this time – I said that to scare her . . .’ Ryan had no idea if this was true, but instinctively he knew that he had to convince Chelle that it was. ‘You don’t have to breathe like that . . . it’s OK, it’s OK . . .’

  For a while Ryan thought he’d have to get her to the hospital after all, but eventually she started to breathe without the awful squeak.

  ‘Thanks,’ she whispered, as Ryan helped her to her feet. ‘Sorrysorrysorrysorry . . .’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Come on, you’re going to stay at mine for a bit till you’re OK. You’re not going home yet.’ They walked in silence for a while.

  ‘She’ll tell my mum and dad, she’ll tell . . . they’re going to look at me with fear . . .’

  ‘No they’re not. If she tells them you’re a demon mind-reading child, they’re going to look at her like she’s gone senile. Just now we called her bluff about getting an ambulance, and she bottled out. She can’t tell any more than we can.’

  ‘She . . .’ Chelle paused to jerk another hiccup of breath into her lungs. ‘She’s right about me, I’ve always felt it, I’m just like this hollow thing where a proper person ought to be . . . that’s why I’ve got the thought-speaking power, isn’t it? People’s thoughts run right through me and out the other side because . . . because . . . because there’s not enough real person inside to get in the way . . .’

  ‘No! She’s an old cow, Chelle. A stupid, mad old cow.’ Ryan heard his own voice sounding ugly and angular, as if he was about to cry or throw up.

  ‘She’ll pay in blood,’ said Chelle with sudden viciousness. Ryan’s heart and feet both stopped dead. He turned to see Chelle’s face contorted in what looked a great deal like pain, her eyebrows working in a way that should have been comic but wasn’t. Her tone was flat, but far from emotionless. She was almost singing the words, all on the same low note. ‘She has to, I can’t bear it, knowing that she’s just walking around thinking nothing can touch her. Smiling. I know right now she’s smiling. Perhaps she’s thinking about me and smiling. She needs to choke on her Chardonnay, she needs to strangle in her shawl, I need to take that smile off her face forever . . .’ Chelle’s features grimaced and then crumpled into a more familiar misery.

  ‘Chelle, tell me that wasn’t you!’

  ‘No, of course it wasn’t, I don’t know who it was, another wisher, somebody passing, I don’t know who, and oh, it felt like I just put my hand in a drawer full of knives without meaning to, but they’ve gone now . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t Miss Goss?’

  ‘No, I’d know if she was a wisher, wouldn’t I?’ whispered Chelle.

  Ryan had to admit that logic was on her side, and yet there had been something strangely familiar about the tone of the voice in this last outburst. He mentally compared it to the ‘voices’ of the other wishers whose thoughts Chelle had spoken, but none of them seemed to match.

  ‘Ryan, I don’t care what she wished, I don’t want to make anybody pay in blood, I don’t like this, I don’t like doing this any more . . .’

  ‘No, I know.’ Ryan was also shaken by the sheer venom in the unknown wisher’s tone. ‘We can’t go on like this. Chelle . . . I’m going to have a talk with her.’

  Chelle looked at him with awe and fear.

  ‘You’re going to talk to Miss Gossamer?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean her, I mean . . . Her.’

  When they reached Ryan’s house his parents had gone to bed, and it was clear that his absence had not been noticed again. Chelle’s asthma attack seemed to have tired her out, and she fell asleep on the sofa with startling promptness under a couple of coats. Ryan called her mum and lied that Chelle had popped over to see him, then fallen asleep watching TV. Chelle’s mum wasn’t happy, but she agreed to let Chelle stay and speak to her in the morning. Ryan didn’t know what else he could do. He left her to sleep.

  While he brushed his teeth Ryan ran the shower for a while to fill the landing and bathroom with steam. Despite himself, he felt a steady, seeping panic, even as he saw his face disappear from the mirror and the towel rails grow fainter. He wondered if after this the ice-white peppermint of the toothpaste would always taste of apprehensive fear.

  He padded back along the darkened landing to his room, got into bed and took his glasses off. As an afterthought, he slid a cold glass over the skin of his forehead and the now pallid, innocuous-looking warts on his knuckles.

  ‘Glass House,’ he thought as he lowered himself to the pillow. ‘Glass House.’

  For a long time he lay in an oppressive darkness in which his mind jogged against half-imagined anxieties, hearing the tick of the radiator and the buzz of distant cars. Whenever he tried to focus on the Glass House his heart beat in his ears and he hardly dared to keep his eyes shut. Eventually, however, his fears dimmed and lost detail, and sleep crept upon him gently like a valley filling with mist.

  After a long while he found that his eyes were open, and looked around.

  Glass House.

  He pulled on his socks before lowering his feet to the cold, clouded floor. Was it a trick of the steam or were there fine cracks running across the walls now?

  On the landing he paused and peered through each bedroom wall. His father was lying on his translucent bed, awake and staring at the ceiling. Glistening ghost snakes of the sort Ryan had seen before curled from his chest, seemingly active and alert. His mother lay asleep in the next room, floating upon her colourless bed. She was surrounded and cradled by her transparent tendrils, making her look a bit like a sea anemone.

  The stairs chilled him through his socks. Beyond the living-room wall he saw Chelle sleeping in her cocoon of coats and was surprised by how tiny and timorous were the ‘snakes’ that quivered with her dreams.

  He looked down at his own chest and squinted at the almost imperceptible tentacles that arced gracefully from it. If they’re wishes, he thought to himself, I wonder what mine are. Why don’t I know?

  He opened the back door. Outside, as before, was a plain of tarmac beneath a sky like brown paper. Once again, in the distance he glimpsed a long chain of supermarket trolleys, and this time he was quite certain that there were a couple of human figures among them, thrashing slowly as if under water, their heads lolling this way and that.

  Trying to ignore them, he strode towards the wall that divided the tarmac from the sky. He found footholds between the bricks and clambered on to the wall, feeling the rough moss prickle through his socks, and a damp wind rush up to meet him. Below him Magwhite yawned, a thousand yellow leaves whirling in its throat. He crouched, preparing to climb down the wall as he had with Chelle and Josh in the real Magwhite. It was not necessary however. The Trolley in the Tree was waiting for him.

  Like startled birds, the parchment-coloured leaves in the nearest tree took to the air, revealing the trolley nestling among the twigs, its wire-lattice skeleton tarnished greenish-silver. As the leaves whirled and circled around the tree, the nearest bough unfurled gracefully so that its tip touched the wall beside Ryan’s feet. Taking the hint, he crawled out on to the bough, occasionally gripping fistfuls of stems to prevent himself falling.

  Ryan had always thought that trolleys had far too much body language for objects with no heads or limbs. This one was clearly waiting. As he stared at it, its seat flapped down. From the trunk of the tree jutted three horizontal slabs of soggy-looking fungus, softly rounded and brown as toast. The lowest did not crumble when he tested it with his foot, so he scaled them like rungs and climbed into the trolley.

  There was a cracking sound beneath him, as if the branches were breaking under the strain of his weight. Ryan clutched at the wire sides as the trolley dropped and lurched forward as if to throw him out. But it was caught by another branch which swung and hurled the trolley on and forward. He and the tr
olley were falling sideways through a storm of thorn and crackle, explosions of twigs against metal, and clods of saffron-coloured moss torn from the trees.

  Then the trolley stilled, tilted and dropped five gut-hugging feet into a huddle of mottled puffballs the size of melons. Clouds of floury spores huffed into the air and floated like smoke. Only as they cleared did Ryan see where he had fallen.

  All around him, lime-green and smoky-yellow moss seethed and bubbled, pockmarked like coral. A few feet away, almost ludicrous in its familiarity, was the Magwhite well, looking just as it always had, the folded crisp packets still jutting from its grille. Somehow now, however, he could hardly bear to look at it. He could not fight the feeling that there was something seeping slowly from the well and hanging in the air above it. It was almost a smell that was almost a darkness that was almost an echo that was almost a bitter taste in the air.

  And then he tightened his stockinged toes in the moss to give himself courage, clenched fistfuls of his coat pockets and tried to look at the Spirit of the Well.

  She sat enthroned amid the fanned roots of an enormous overturned tree. The roots knobbed and knuckled, and among them were wedged weird trophies. A child’s pink wellington boot choked with ivy, a hiking stick that had sprouted and given bud, the skull of a cat. A hundred bent cigarette butts smoked gently like incense sticks in a church shrine. A bent bicycle wheel spun slowly and unevenly behind her head, a halo for a strange saint. Her gown was studded with fragments of gold foil, punctured in crude patterns, and there was a tarnished, twisted collar of copper wire round her neck.

  It was easiest to look at her hands. They were thick and strange, with lichen-green knuckles and heavy nails that might have been chipped out of dun-yellow quartz. They drew their fingers over and through the wild strawberry plant that trembled in her lap as if it was a pet.

  He dared not look at her face, even though only her profile was towards him. In his peripheral vision he could see her head turning slowly this way and that, as if trying to shake off some unbearable thought or torpor. Around it swayed long wreathes of darkness that seemed to bloom and fade in the air like streaks of ink dripped into water. It was hair, it was not hair.

  Remembering Josh, Ryan made a small martial-arts bow, his hands folded in front of his waist.

  ‘Um . . . Great Lady . . .’ He was uncomfortably aware that the moss was slowly giving beneath him and that icy water was bubbling up around his feet like champagne. ‘I had to come and talk to you. There’s a . . . there’s a problem.’

  He felt, rather than heard, the answer.

  Make the problem not be. Make the wishes be.

  ‘That’s . . . the problem, the problem is the wishes. There’s a wish we only granted because we didn’t realize it was all about destruction. And now we’ve got another wisher who keeps going on about revenge and someone paying in blood. And . . . that’s a wish we can’t grant. You must understand that.’

  You must understand. Understand and make the wishes be.

  ‘But we can’t this time! And . . . there are some wishes that might need to be, um, un-granted a bit, because people are getting badly hurt and miserable . . .’

  The Well Spirit’s roar of displeasure was less a sound than a change in the flavour of the air. Burning tyres and a rasp of bitter-stale. Darkness clotting in Ryan’s veins like treacle.

  No un-granted. Wished hurt. Wanted miserable. Happy now.

  ‘But . . . can’t we just bring you lots more coins to replace the ones we took instead?’ The air was darkening still, and the leaves were livid yellow as they settled around the throne to listen to the Well Spirit.

  Nobody drinks, water is sour. Everyone drinks, more water rises. Let the mouths drink. Make the wishes be.

  Bewildered, Ryan wanted to ask more, but his vision was misting. He waved his hand through the air to bat away a stray wreath of puffball powder, only to find that it was one of the faint ghost snakes arcing from his chest. All of his snakes were stretched out as if in a current towards the figure in the throne. With shock, he realized that at their extremity each dim tentacle had a faint, gaping, beakish mouth.

  He gave a squawk and flailed at his own chest as if he could uproot them and found himself in darkness, struggling against a softness that proved to be his sheet. He was soaked with perspiration, and it was a moment before he could convince himself that he had not tumbled backwards into the damp embrace of the Magwhite moss.

  19

  The Shattering

  ‘Your mother will not be joining us for breakfast . . .’ Ryan’s father paused as he noticed Chelle seated at the breakfast table, nibbling at a piece of toast, both feet tucked nervously behind one chair leg.

  ‘Chelle stayed here last night,’ said Ryan, ‘She had an asthma attack in the street . . . so I brought her here – it was nearer.’

  ‘With her parents’ permission, I assume?’

  Ryan’s ‘yes’ and Chelle’s ‘no’ collided over the breakfast table and both subsided into confusion.

  ‘Wonderful.’

  Ryan’s father slapped absently at his pocket a few times with his newspaper. ‘I expect that will turn out to be my fault as well,’ he muttered, and strode out.

  ‘Did I . . . ?’

  ‘No, Chelle,’ said Ryan, reaching for a bread knife. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s mine.’

  After breakfast they phoned Josh and arranged to meet in the park. Then, with an expression of great apprehension, Chelle phoned her own house. Ryan listened to the bubble of distant voices with sympathy and watched Chelle’s eyebrows disappear behind her fringe as she attempted broken sentence after sentence. Chelle had once said that she didn’t know how to be in trouble. From the sound of it, she would have to learn pretty fast. He wanted to say something comforting when she put the phone down, but he was short on comfort himself. At least all the yelling sounded like ordinary trouble. He had an idea that the Coopers might have sounded rather different if Miss Gossamer had told them that Chelle was a telepathic demon child.

  ‘Josh’ll have some ideas,’ Chelle whispered faintly as they set off for the park. Ryan said nothing. He was bracing himself for something that felt harder than confronting Miss Gossamer, harder even than braving an interview with the Well Spirit.

  It was a dazzling day, a honeyed hay-fever day. Bees swayed drugged through the park and fumbled in the throats of pansies. They found Josh sprawling on the grass with his hands behind his head.

  ‘You both look like you’ve come to pay your last respects,’ he remarked conversationally.

  ‘Josh, we’ve got something to tell you, I was going to the hospital last night because, did you see, Will’s been in a horrible accident . . .’

  ‘Oh, so that’s why you both look like that. Yeah, I saw the news story. Relax, he’s not dead. Bet you he’ll be wobbling around on his Harley again in a week.’ As Ryan and Chelle sat down on either side of him, Josh rummaged in a carrier. ‘OK, smile, or you don’t get one of these.’ He handed each of them a cellophane-wrapped package containing a square of folded black cloth.

  Ryan pulled the cellophane from his and unfolded a large black T-shirt. On the front of it was a crude design a bit like a cartoon wishing well, and below that the white words ‘Well’s Angels’. Josh was husking laughter into his fist.

  ‘Go on, put them on,’ he said, grinning. ‘C’mon, nobody else is going to know what “well’s angels” means, are they?’

  Chelle pulled her T-shirt over her head. Her fine fringe fluffed as she did so, so that some of it clung to her forehead and some shot straight upwards.

  ‘It’s really nice, Josh,’ she murmured.

  ‘Now look,’ continued Josh, ‘I’ve got today planned out. We’re not going back to Carrie’s for a couple of days, right? Well, we can’t just sit about waiting for the Well Spirit to throw more trolleys at Ryan. I’ve been thinking – we know all the wishers ended up in Magwhite, or they couldn’t have dropped coins down the well. So maybe some of the
m were there visiting, but probably some of them live there. So today we’ll head out to Magwhite and just drive up and down until Chelle picks up something . . . put your T-shirt on, Ryan.’

  Ryan had spread the T-shirt out across his lap and was running a finger over the rubbery surface of the letters and the well picture. He wondered if Josh had used fruit-machine money to buy them or just forced Donna to pay.

  ‘You don’t get your say if you’re not wearing the uniform,’ insisted Josh. ‘This is a Well’s Angels-only meeting.’

  ‘I’m not putting this on.’ I just can’t wear this, is what Ryan had meant to say, but something had come down in his mind like a portcullis. He thought he saw Josh swallow with annoyance.

  ‘You know, Chelle,’ Josh maintained a relaxed, playful tone, ‘it almost feels like there’s somebody else here, but we’d be able to see and hear him if there was, wouldn’t we?’ Chelle looked utterly miserable. She gave Ryan a fearful look as if pleading for him to put on the T-shirt.

  ‘I’m not wearing this,’ Ryan said again.

  ‘Why not, for crying out loud?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Ryan swallowed and stared down at his hands, lining them up to straighten his thoughts. ‘Because I’m not doing this any more, Josh.’

  ‘Not doing this? Not doing what? Not granting wishes? Well, that’s funny because the thing is, you are, Ryan. We all are. Probably you don’t remember, but we don’t have any choice about it. We’re not doing this for fun.’

  Ryan sneaked a look at Josh, who was now leaning forward, propping his weight on his fists. Aren’t you, Josh? Isn’t this fun for you?

  ‘Ryan didn’t mean it like . . .’ Chelle was twisting one thumb in the hem of her T-shirt. ‘. . . it’s just some things that happened, some things, yesterday evening . . .’ Ryan and Chelle tag-teamed the telling of the encounter with Miss Gossamer and the brief glimpse into the new mystery wisher’s vengeful mind.

  ‘You two haven’t got a clue, have you?’ interrupted Josh towards the end. ‘You should’ve phoned Chelle’s parents and got your version of the story in before Miss Gossamer could talk to them. You could’ve shown them Chelle while she was still blue and told them Miss Gossamer tried to kill her.’ He frowned and inserted one finger behind his sunglasses to rub at his eye. ‘That way, if she tried to tell anyone about us she’d sound like even more of a nutter.’